April 3, 2012 |
Mah-jongg is a game filled with poetic phrases and dark objectives. The 144 tiles are named after the four winds, and various flowers, and what’s the difference between the mixed hand game and the cleared hand game, the one double and two double? Should discards lie face down or face up, how to handle the prevailing wind, how to assume the east seat, so many questions and mah-jongg provides no answers, only more questions.
There are a number of arcane rituals in the original Chinese version of mah-jongg, but these were removed or simplified for Western digestive purposes. They happen at the start of the game, when the tiles are shuffled with a deliberate clatter, to banish thieving spirits, the four “walls” are formed into a defensive square, the wall is then split and a “Kong box” is created. These eccentric actions stem from a desire by the participants to eliminate any chance of cheating from the game, since some players once, and probably still do, gamble heavily on its outcome. These rituals persist in the Chinese version, but the Westernised, bowdlerized variants of mah-jongg have become so overdeveloped that even some skilled players are uncertain of the rules.
The game is played with tiles, usually now made of plastic, rather than paper cards. One mah-jongg creation myth suggests that the game may have been invented on the Ark, when Noah and his crew, bored as they floated along on the flood waters, began playing a game using animals as collateral. By the time the waters receded, Noah had a zoo’s worth of debt, which he never managed to pay off. This story seems as unlikely as the standard claims of the involvement of Confucius, who never played a hand of mah-jongg in his long life. Other unfounded rumors claim it was first played at the 5th-century BC court of King Wu, known as “Woo Woo” to his circle of male admirers, who all played together in secret, no women allowed. In fact, the game is of more recent vintage, but the Chinese are happy to let Westerners mythologise it along with every other quaint and ancient factoid about their culture.
In search of answers, we went down to Chinatown to seek out some zen tile shifters, jonggo hustlers, bone scriveners, masters of the ivory. But Chinatown retained its inscrutable mask. In the park at Chatham Square, the crowded benches were segregated into groups of all-male and all-female players. The women appeared to be playing poker with a savage intensity, gambling small fragments of the fortunes they had acquired from years of hard labour. At the male tables, older guys, stern faced as hit men from a John Woo movie, carefully arranged their tiles, playing an elaborate game that might have been a version of mah-jongg, but no one would say for sure. Our tentative inquiries were greeted with hostile glares, as if we were asking to see their green cards rather than doing a little sociological research.
A craving for dim sum, for carp tails and cocktails, brought us to Doyers Street, once known as Blood Alley, for all the Tong War victims dumped there on a nightly basis in the roaring 1920s. Now the only weapons in sight are the cut-throat razors in the many barbershops that line the street, dispensing perfect haircuts for $10 a pop. An old restaurant down there used to serve dim sum in the front and run a large gambling operation in the back. Alas it has been modernised, which means they changed the tablecloths and got rid of the food trolleys. The old booths are still intact, and the dim sum just as unpalatable as it once was, but there are no games of chance or gamblers in sight – indeed, the back room is now a banquet room that does a booming business in wedding parties. There’s no mystery in the history.
The man who brought mah-jongg to the US in the 1920s, Joseph Babcock, an employee of Standard Oil in Shanghai, was a man so shrewd, so Barnum-like in his estimation of the public that he copyrighted the name mah-jongg, putting a crimp in the competition who had to come up with a new name, one without the double g he’d slipped in, to give the word a ringing sound, the same way “Blaggg” rings out when it is screamed aloud in the midnight. Babcock changed it from mah keh, which is the original Chinese name. That word means, among other things, “hemp sparrow”. Supposedly the ivory tiles scraping on the table imitate the sound of a sparrow’s chirp, a clickety-clack sound that invokes great swooping flights of tiny birds homing on a few breadcrumbs, the way sparrows are wont to do. So the sound of bones scraping on a table conjures sparrows and then these birds would actually descend from the sky to feed from the crumbs that fell from the sleeves of the players’ robes, where they kept their own pet birds concealed.
Babcock’s entrepreneurial blocking motion forced his competitors to come up with new names, among them Ma Chong, Pung Chow, Erica Jong. How did Babcock know that this complex game would catch on in the United States in the roaring 1920s, when the game ignited the American imagination like a forest fire, and is still surrounded by myths? For instance, why did Jewish widows take up the game with such relish? And gamble away their husbands’ fortunes on afternoons at the Plaza? Of course, they didn’t; they played the game with elegance and restraint, and their husbands, if still alive, were happy, because it kept them out of Bergdorf’s for a few hours at least.
Certainly mah-jongg was and still is a very popular game among older Jewish women. Because of its incredibly complex and ever-changing rules, it was also known as “the game of a thousand intelligences”. In New York it may have crossed over from Chinatown to the Jewish quarter of the Lower East Side, both thriving neighborhoods that co-existed in distant harmony before the white flight to the suburbs of Long Island. In American mah-jongg tare variations are made to the basic rules each year by a shadowy committee. Oddly enough, according to one lad who remembers the click of tiles in his mother’s living room with an intensity that recalls his childhood as vividly as Proust’s soggy madeleine, the games went on for hours, and the women played with a seriousness that belied their smiling faces, and dinner wasn’t always ready when papa came home. Also, the National Mah Jongg League announced the updated rules each year on Mother’s Day. Which meant for sonny boy that mother was far too busy studying the new regulations to really notice that her doting child had bought her flowers and chocolates on this special day, gifts that were shoved aside as she scrutinised the new rulebook, hoping to find an edge that would help her beat Esther and Ruth and Ina and the other hardcore members of her kabalistic tile-clacking clique.
The mah-jongg craze of the 1920s also brought Asian costume along with it. This first injection of Oriental culture into Western society discovered Western women floating about in exotic cheongsams with fans and other finery, ignorant of the etiquette, but gorgeous nonetheless in that most elegant of dresses, gliding through the rooms with a rustle of fine silk and shantung, further enhancing the alien sexiness of this new game.
Abercrombie & Fitch sold mah-jongg sets faster than any other item in their massive collection of sporting goods. Ezra Fitch himself, who knew a fad when he saw one, dispatched buyers to China with cold cash and strict orders to purchase any and every set they set eyes on. The high tide in mahjongg’s popularity was 1923. The game raged through America, with demonstrations in stores and social clubs, retail tie-ins with everything from cruise lines to bakeries and even funeral parlours, instructors more numerous than the yoga instructors who roam New York today with their tightly rolled rubber mats, ready to demonstrate the downward facing dog at a moment’s notice.
Tiles were made in ivory, Bakelite, even semiprecious metals, but the luxury end of the market was soon exhausted, the inlaid hand-tooled sets shipped rapidly back and snapped up by eager players in New York City and the rest of the country. The remnants can still be seen on eBay, where a thriving trade in old sets still flourishes, with signs warning buyers to beware of fake ivory. There was such a run on real ivory in the 1920s that elephants went into hiding, and soon domestic animal bone was introduced as a substitute. But the Chinese ate more poultry and fish than beef, so they were still short of bone to fill the demand for tiles. A curious trade sprang up: vast quantities of cows’ bones were shipped from the Kansas City and Chicago slaughterhouses to factories in Shanghai. There the bones were boiled down, bleached to whiteness, then sawn into bite-size pieces and honed by craftsmen into elegant scrimshawed squares. Whole villages worked on different parts of each set, as they do now with electronic games and devices, some cutting and moulding the tiles, others carving and painting the exquisite designs that adorned their faces.
In the West, the games became elaborate social occasions, enhanced by extravagant Oriental outfits. Some mah-jongg parties went on for days, and neighbours often smelled a rich earthy odour emanating from those locations, along with the sparrow tweeting click of tiles. That smell was doubtless the fumes of opium, still legal then, which was packed in pipes and handed to the players, to enhance the giddy Oriental flavour of these evenings, American parlours filled with dreamy-eyed participants, laying down their hand-carved tiles, wagering homes and cars to foot the bill for losses incurred as they played relentlessly in their imported shantung-silk clothing, brandishing hand-painted fans, hair held in place by ivory chopsticks. Shanghai on the Hudson.
Certain films directed by Wong Kar-Wai, especially In the Mood for Love and 2046, perhaps best evoke the visual idea of the lost world of mah-jongg. They are lyrical studies of a mythical 1930s Shanghai, in which gorgeous women in perfectly tailored versions of the cheongsam, in the most ravishing colours and fine embroidery, are draped across the screen, heavenly creatures inhabiting a milieu of love and betrayal among the games of chance, clicking tiles, the rustle of silk as the cheongsam slides off a widow’s shoulders in Room 2046.
What do we talk about when we talk about mah-jongg? Is the “thirteen orphans” the greatest mah-jongg hand ever played? Or should that honour go to the nine gates of heaven? You be the judge. Here, in the park, a skilled player is executing a move on the worn concrete surface of the table that brings gasps of admiration from the other players and the more knowledgeable bystanders clustered around the game like a jury. I don’t have a clue what made that simple click of a tile so marvellous. The mysteries of the East persist.
by Max Blagg
